Authors: Harlan Ellison
“ ’Scuse me, sir, but can you tell me like if they let out the other guys?” He thought of the blood in the bowling alley.
The cop stared the boy down for a long instant, then his neck cords began to stand out, and in a terribly soft slow voice he said, “Get the hell out of here.”
Rusty left as quickly as possible.
Outside, Boy-O was slouching against a wall, an ordinary cigarette dangling from his unshaven face. He smelled even stronger than usual and the wild, junkie-stare was so bad Rusty could have sworn a pair of diamonds were screwed into the sockets, blazing out.
Boy-O took a shove away from the wall, approached Rusty. The other tried to swerve around him, but the junkie said, “Hey, Rusty, hold up a second.”
Rusty stopped and looked at the hophead. “Whaddayou want?”
“I been waitin’ till they let the gang out. Some of the guys needed carfare like. They’re holdin’ three or four of the guys.”
So that explained what had happened to the Cherokees and the Cougars, but Rusty was impatient to be away from the great gray hulk of the police building. “So? Why you stoppin’ me?”
“I just wanted to tell ya I was sorry ta hear what happened.”
Rusty was puzzled. Boy-O never had been a good friend. What did he care if Rusty Santoro spent the night in a cell on a metal trough?
“For what? I’m out, ain’t I?”
Boy-O looked surprised, then shocked, then partial understanding filtered through to his dreamy brain. “Oh, hey, man, then you don’t know. Hey, that’s right, they didn’t find her till this mornin’, so you didn’t get the word yet.”
A chill slipped up Rusty’s neck and he grabbed the junkie by his filthy lapels. “What? What are you talkin’ about? Come on, you sonofabitch, open up or I’ll cream ya!”
He knew, somehow, horribly; even before Boy-O spoke.
“Your sister, man. They found her this mornin’. Somebody—uh—raped her and left her in an alley behind Tom-Tom’s joint.”
Rusty felt the anchors of his jaws tighten and he thought for a moment he would drop into the street. He had to know.
He had to know
—
“Tell me! Talk, you dustie, talk! How is she?”
Boy-O looked terrified, as though he were face to face with something alien. He wanted to run away, but Rusty had him fast and was choking him without knowing it.
He stammered and Rusty hit him across the mouth. “Talk!
Talk!”
He bit his lips in fury and screamed loud so the whole clean, fine, nice start-all-over day would know, “Tell me—how is she?”
“Gee, man, I’m sorry… She’s dead like. Somebody stuck a knife inta her.”
The past screamed and Rusty heard.
Somehow, the walk home, partially through quiet Cherokee turf, passed without his knowing it. His feet moved and his arms swung and he stopped for traffic lights when he stopped. But he saw nothing and no sounds or smells came through to him.
He was a five-foot nine-inch moving statue. He was on a trek through nowhere at all and he walked with steady persistence. Where thoughts had been, where the clean reach of the day had lain, nothing but a swirl of color remained. It was a wild mélange of heaving, surging dull orange, wisps of light gray almost blue, streaks sudden and painful of red and heavy black. It was impossible for anything to get in and nothing trapped inside could find its way free.
Shock!
The steady movement of feet that was completely unnoticed.
He opened the door to the apartment and walked in. No sound. No movement of air. A stillness and a softness almost oppressive in its totality. And yes, of course, the clock had stopped. He knew it would be like that, like a dream he had once had, and forgotten, now rushing back like the night wind to fill his mind. The clock had stopped, the unity was gone, Dolores was—
The word came then:
Dead.
No, not dead. He said it once aloud to hear it, “No, not dead,” then added as though the word meant something for the first time, “murdered.”
No gang rumble where a nameless boy who held a switchblade lay with his belly split wide; no stomping of a Greenwich Village queer, so his head was mashed potatoes; no technicolor, CinemaScope, stereophonic daydream in an RKO shadow-house. This was real and it was the thing in itself. This was his sister, the last one, the lost one, and she was gone. And that was
not
just that. That was the end of a bit of the world that meant something, that had a way to the light, that moved and talked and swayed prettily to the phonograph’s noise, that tapped the fork at dinner, and that was too young—yes, goddamn it—too
young
to die.
The clock had stopped. Someone had let it waste its time to stillness. It meant something, but Rusty did not know what or why, or even if he should care about it. He wanted to cry. Why couldn’t he cry?
There was a vague noise from the kitchen. Moms.
He walked through the long railroad flat and into the kitchen where she prowled like a warm, soft gray animal.
He saw her as though he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Very far away and moving with terribly exaggerated actions—first at the vegetable bin, then at the sink, then carefully peeling the potatoes. Were they the only things in the world for her? Didn’t she know?
“Ma,” he spoke softly, and was surprised to hear how loud and unpleasant his voice sounded in the mausoleum stillness of the apartment. She turned to him, blank eyes that were luster-less and face devoid of expression. He knew her, then; knew her as she was inside, stripped as bare as the potatoes in the sink, with only the blank eyes left.
She turned back to her work without a word and began systematically to gouge out the potato eyes.
He repeated the single word. “Ma?”
She slumped a bit more from the shoulders and he thought he saw her shiver slightly. The trembling carried itself and he felt a weakness in the back of his own knees. “I was downtown, Ma,” he added.
She did not respond and he wondered if she had suddenly gone deaf. It was an odd feeling, all at once, and he thought of Rip Van Winkle. Had he been away more than one night in jail? Had he been shut up behind steel for, say, fifty years, and had now come back to a stranger who no longer knew him? It passed in an instant, but for that instant he was standing on a cold, empty highway, watching the Last Car Ever tooling away in dust.
“I said, I was downtown, Ma. I got picked up last night when I went after—” He stopped himself short. Dolores. He didn’t want to say her name like that. He wanted to build to it. At first, when he had come up the three flights of steps to the apartment, he had thought he would burst in and yell
Where’s Dolo? Ma, Dolo’s dead!
but the silence of the place had smoothed over the inferno within him.
The fire was still there, and he could feel it building, but he knew he must be careful. She had had it bad, and if she knew—
If she knew.
“Ma,” he hesitated. The words were like taffy in his mouth. “I talked to somebody, Ma. He t-told me Dolo was—Dolo’s—”
It would have to lie there. He was not going to say it.
She saved him the trouble.
“I know.”
The voice came from the other side of the universe and barely made the journey. Soft. Soft.
“Is it true? She was—she was—I mean, like he said?”
Then she turned and the blank oval spaces that should have been her eyes grayed out at him and her mouth moved like a pencil line that had somehow been endowed with life.
“Raped,”
she said and twisted the word once. “She was on her face, in a dirty alley with a garbage can tipped over on her, to hide her. Empty ice-cream containers was dripped all over her, I don’t know. She was. There. I saw her face. She was wet. It rained last night. I don’t know. Her blouse was black where he did it with the thing, with I guess he did it with a knife, it was black…”
Her words were confused, the agony ramblings of a woman in shock. Rusty listened, knowing he should remember all this. This was the death of his sister and perhaps the death of his mother. But it all went by rapidly and he saw her only as hysterical. He had to stop her talking that way.
“Mom! Stop it, you gotta stop it, please, stop it!”
But she went on, talking more to herself than to him. “I went there. I don’t know why they let her lay there like that. Why was that? I don’t know. There was a policeman who said, ‘Look there lady and tell us if that’s your daughter,’ so I looked. I thought you had to go downtown to that there, I don’t know, what do they call it? Why was I called down to the street? Why was she there in the… the… there? Why was she killed?”
Her hands had twined soundlessly together. Two lost things searching for peace. Her face had turned half away, and the wall received her words. Rusty could not move to her, could do nothing, for a long century of pain in his chest. Then he walked slowly and put his arms around her.
She seemed to melt, then, and she was a child who had lost a dear loved thing. She did not cry, because that would have been easy, that would have been a release. She was numb and trembled under dry, wracking shakes that were a product of disbelief, of confusion, of searching. Rusty realized how much he needed his mother, how much she needed him, and he lay her head on his chest, said to her softly, “Mom, Mom, please. It’s okay, you’ll see, it’ll be okay, we’ll be all right, just take it easy, Mom; and it’ll be okay.” He said it again and again, in endless strings of words that started nowhere, ended nowhere, and soothed himself alone. He knew they did not reach her, but he said them more and more, hoping.
“Do, do you remember, she was ten then, just ten, and she come home, said the other kids wouldn’t play with her ’cause she was Puerto Rican and slammed the screen door on her knee. You remember, just ten, and she cried, god how she cried, and I wanted to tell her it don’t matter honey, ’cause you’re good too and prettier than any of them whites…You remember that?”
Rusty remembered. He remembered all the stupid people who had hated the Santoro family, the trouble they had had getting squared away in the new neighborhood, the way Pops had done them so low with his drinking and all, and the way Dolores had grown beautiful and ripe like a flower, just the same. A spot of pretty in the gray of the streets.
Moms stiffened in his embrace and suddenly she shoved against him, threw him back with hatred. Her face was transformed. It was like a scream in the night. Bright red flash in the gray. He felt attacked, he countered with fright. Why that expression?
Her eyes were livid pits of slag and her mouth was a raw, wounded gash that opened and snapped closed with hatred and vehemence.
“You!
You did it! You made her join that gang. You killed her. Like the knife was yours, you killed her. You’re the one. Oh, god!” She tore at her breasts, at her belly, screaming, her hair wild and streaming. “Oh, god! I gave birth to you, you filth. You scum, you bastard son of mine! Oh, god, I wish you’d died in my womb, died, god, died! If you’d never touched her with your filth—if you’d never touched her she’d be alive now, she’d be alive!”
Rusty could not speak. What could he say? Was she hysterical or was it the truth? Was he to blame, indirectly?
“I wish you was dead, dead and in the grave and buried under six feet, and she was here, and God I’d make it up to her, I’d treat her fine and damn her father for his wild ways…
“But it was you, you that killed her as sure as if you put that knife in her breast! Get out, get out of my house. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you sleeping in the same house where she slept or ate off the table—or
—get out! Get out!”
Her face was livid, her hands claws that tore at the air. She came toward him haltingly, with that loathing burning in her face. Her hands moved out for him and Rusty was frightened at the abrupt change the space of a minute had brought. Her mouth opened and no words came this time, but a spatter of drool oozed from one corner of her thin gray lips. No words came out, though the fire burned high and bright in her cheeks, but Rusty knew what was being said.
You killed your sister. You did it. You’re responsible.
Rusty stared unmoving as his mother came toward him and suddenly she lashed out with both hands doubled. Her fists thundered against his face and he felt pain that rocked his head. All her fury went into those blows, as she mumbled over and over, “
You! You
made ’er join that gang! If you’d of left her alone, she’d be alive! You did it to her! Murderer! Murderer murderer murderer…”
Rusty turned and fled.
The street was filled with Sunday crowds of housewives, slobbering dogs, sweating trucks. There was a steady beat in the streets and sidewalks—the sort of beat that makes you fall asleep over tiresome desk jobs; the kind of beat that makes the loners in the pool hall toss down their cues, gather up their winnings and slump against the Coke machine. The sort of beat that makes the old men lounging on the stoops in front of the buildings think they’re catching a tan. The sort of beat that brought euphoria to Rusty. He walked aimlessly.
He remembered having seen Pancoast sometime that afternoon. He remembered having seen Pops, too, but that was a memory he wanted to slip away and he did not dwell on it.
Pancoast had been annoyed at him. Sullenly annoyed, and he had not come right out and called Rusty a turncoat. The boy remembered the red-haired teacher, the way he had sat in the modern contour chair—an inexpensive replica of a Paul McCobb original—and sucked on the dry, split end of a metal-stemmed pipe. He remembered the dark gray eyes as they turned up to him and the worry lines about the man’s mouth and eyes.
The voices that had been there came back as they had been; strong, clear and filled with hidden emotions.
“You let me down, Rusty.” It was a statement.
“No.”
“What were you doing there if you weren’t waiting for the rumble?”
“My sister… I was… was looking for her.”
“I know. I heard a while ago over the radio. It made the papers.”
Rusty knew the conversation had gone on from there, with his position strengthening and the teacher’s calm trust flowing back. He had been glad about that. It had helped him a little and for a few minutes he saw a clearing in the fog. But the teacher had been a shadow, really, and the recurring image of Dolores, so small and pretty, kept returning to eat at his mind. He had assured Pancoast nothing more would happen, and had left, with the teacher making a gun of thumb and forefinger, aiming it and saying heavily, “Be good, son. They’ll find the bastard.”